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Improving Physician and Pharma (Life Science) Company Interactions

The 9th Annual ePharma Summit was recently held in Philadelphia the week of February 8th, otherwise known as “Snowpocalypse”. Those of us who braved the blizzard were rewarded with a terrific set of discussions on the role digital and social media can play to improve the working relationship between physicians and pharma.

In our last post, Practicing Medicine in a Mobile Powered World, Jason shared a vision of how a physician’s workflow might look in the not too distant future. As Jason described, this is a world where the pharmaceutical information and services physician’s require are available when the physician needs them, inserted into the clinician’s workflow in a manner that improves rather than hinders their ability to diagnose and treat patients effectively.

Today, physicians need the following when it comes to assessing pharmaceutical information at the point of care:

1. Fast, simple, reliable answers to product questions

2. Peer-to-Peer interaction and trusted feedback

3. Access to rep like services provided on their terms

Doctors want fast, reliable, access to credible information they need to practice effectively. They want it on-demand and within their clinical workflow and they clearly want to know what their peers really think. Whether this is offered via the iPhone, iPad, or even a mobile device not sold by Apple (gasp), it really doesn’t matter.

The mobile device is secondary, of primary importance is redefining the relationship physicians have with pharma marketers. Naturally, many of us attending ePharma believe this change can and should be driven through innovations in the digital world (as highlighted by Sally Church). Many of these thoughts were captured via Twitter during Jason's talk at ePharma and below is the Twitter Stream of the relevant ePharma discussion.

Please note, the 'tweets' highlighted below appear in reverse chronological order so if you want them to really make sense, start at the bottom and work your way up the page

You can also see a summary of the conversation here as well as a great review from Wendy Blackburn entitled: 7 Things I Learned at the ePharma Summit 2010.

Joel Selzer
Co-Founder, Ozmosis

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